Part 3: The rise of “dark kitchens” and delivery hubs.
The number of restaurants that don’t have customers but prepare food for delivery is soaring.
While some restaurants are being forced to shut down or move because of gentrification, others are setting up shop in what would traditionally have been considered undesirable locations. The reason? China’s food-delivery boom.
Digital businesses are reshaping the role of the street and the retail environment, creating new typologies of restaurant and uses of public space. One of the impacts of so-called “dark kitchens” — essentially, restaurants that never take customers but rather produce food for delivery only — is that many streets in Chinese cities are evolving to become informal dispatch centers for food-delivery businesses.
Earlier this year, the Guardianestimatedthat there were at least 70 “dark kitchens” in the United Kingdom. In megacities such as Shanghai or Shenzhen, while there are no figures available, it is safe to assume there are at least 70 dark kitchens in a singleneighborhood.
Wander the back streets of Shanghai and you will find alleyways filled with tiny “restaurants” that don’t have seats or diners. Instead, you will see clusters of orange, blue and yellow-uniformed employees waiting to collect a new delivery order. Inside the restaurants are boxes of plastic containers and single-use cutlery. There are no waiters, only staff receiving orders on phones and printing off receipts for dishes that must be delivered within 28 minutes.
The customers may never see or set foot inside these licensed restaurants. Features of traditional restaurants, such as service or ambience, are irrelevant. Instead, the key metrics are user reviews and ratings, promotions and discounts, and distance from the customer.
A study by Shanghai’s Tongji University mapped the location of these delivery-focused restaurants and found that they tend to cluster three kilometers from the main commercial streets, filling the in-between spaces of the city, where rent is cheaper and they are closer to dense residential areas. “Streets that are commercially-challenged from the perspective of traditional retail business logic — high foot-traffic areas in close proximity to major public transit stations — actually can become successful as delivery hubs,” says Roy Lin.
The physical presence of digital businesses such as food delivery is changing the cityscape and the function of certain streets. While these “dark kitchens” appear to come and go quite frequently, the streets themselves remain resilient as de-facto food-delivery dispatch centers. Once home to shops, restaurants and local residents, many streets are now temporary physical spaces for the exchange of goods through a digital platform. The consequence is a lack of cultural diversity in the streets: instead of ethnic restaurants or grocery shops, many neighborhood streets in Chinese megacities are increasingly filled with delivery-oriented dark kitchens, coffee shops and grocery chains, creating a homogeneous look and experience.
This is a 12-part series on Food Megacity: how urbanization and technology are changing the way China eats. The full series can be found here.
